Capital Markets Outlook 2015: Social media infrastructure in financial services will grow dramatically in the coming year, putting pressure on IT and compliance to shed manual processes and use scalable technology.

Capital Markets Outlook 2015: A bank can get the biggest bang for its IT buck by implementing agile development methodologies. Banks that use agile deliver 96% of their projects on budget and 79% of them on time.

Capital Markets Outlook 2015: Following a few years dominated by regulatory compliance and cost saving technology initiatives, financial organizations are finally investing in innovative technology and tools.

Bitcoin presents a new type of nontraditional, highly technical, experimental, and global digital instrument to our already complex world. That fact should not conjure fear. It should engender excitement.

Instead of putting systems and solutions in the hands of experts who specialize solely in managing the security and integrity of IT assets, many financial services firms react to security incidents by insisting on total control.

It may be time for a consortium of firms motivated around the objective of eliminating the mainframe. What if every self-clearing firm decided to participate in building a modern, back-office system as an open-source, cloud-based project?

IT operations face pressures from both business and development teams to provide new and innovative services. Focus is now on keeping ahead of the wave of startups that harness the cloud's rapid business capabilities.

From the flashy to the practical, financial firms looking to gain operational alpha from infrastructure face an overwhelming world of choices in terms of commercial and off-the-shelf offerings. Proper perspective, kill switches, and diagnostic tools can help.